Sod-Off

SOD OFF - STORIES OF DISTRICT & OF FAMILY & FRIENDS 'Archiving of lives in Europe through Social Arts Practice' Sod Off offers collaborative residential weekends to engage, inspire and ignite peoples living in Europe to tell their stories of place, race and heritage; sod also refers to the earth we came from. Creative Weekends bring participants through a journey of storytelling via creative writing, poetry, music, performance, dance, sculpture, photography and video. Sod Offs’ aim is to produce an archive of personal stories from across the globe through creative arts practice, inspiring a cross-fertilization of ideas and creative practices. The collaborative weekends consist of 2 full days offering exercises, processes and experiments into storytelling through arts practice. Led by a collaborative group of artists, the collaborative sessions bring participants through a series of artistic activity developing stories relating to the personal, political and environmental. The project aims to engage members of the community from all walks of life, in order to offer a series of free artistic workshops, creating access to artistic learning and expression. Each creative weekend has a team of artists who having developed their practice as part of the SAP program in socially engaged fields, will structure the weekend according to the themes outlined by SOD OFF. Their planning of each weekend will include work brought forward from previous weekends in order to keep the thread throughout the processes, exercises and experimentation in their field. As part of Sod Offs program to offer public artistic activity, it aims to work with both emerging and established artists looking to develop their practice by developing new methods of skills exchange and learning possibilities as part of the SAP (Social Arts Practice) development program. The project is geared towards broadening artistic endeavour by offering artists involved in running the collaborative weekends the opportunity to attend all other workshops. Not only offering each weekend workshop in a variety of artistic practices, Sod Offs’ goal is to act as a arena for the development of artistic activity within communities across Europe and beyond by the sharing of stories, becoming a vehicle for creative social change, whilst contemporaneously archiving and celebrating the various experiences of life.